Surgical drapes or towels do often have an adhesive edge, i.e. an adhesive coating along the whole or part of an edge, in order to enable a draping of one or more surgical drapes or towels around an operation site on a body of a patient, in which site a surgical intervention is to be performed. A function of such an adhesive edge is to form a barrier preventing liquid from the operation site to flow in under the surgical drape or towel or bacteria from outside the operation site to enter the operation site from the area under the surgical drape or towel. It can be hard to ensure that such a barrier is leak proof for operation sites on obese patients or on operation sites on curved portions of the body of a patient, e.g. ears, nose, neck and breasts of a patient since the adhesive edge of commercial available surgical drapes or towels can not follow the body contour around the operation sites. In order to solve this problem WO 2008/054312 discloses a surgical drape in which the adhesive edge of the drape consists of a thin plastic film projecting out from the rest of the drape which on one side is coated with an adhesive and on the opposite side has a stiffening strip which is to be removed after application of the drape. The stiffening strip is necessary for enabling handling and application of the drape after removal of a release layer protecting the adhesive coating before application of the drape. However, the application of such a drape is complicated and includes many steps and it is not unusual that portions of the film attach to each other thereby forming folds that increase risk for leakage. Furthermore, it is from a production point of view also complicated to apply such a film along the edge of a base drape.
The objective of the present invention is to provide a surgical drape or towel having an adhesive edge, which is easy to apply, very flexible and stretchable at least in the area of an operation site and relatively easy to produce.